Paul Krassner on Political Satire and Lenny Bruce
Summer 1987 www.amazon.com Paul Krassner (born April 9, 1932) is an author, journalist, stand-up comedian, and the founder, editor and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958. Lenny Bruce (October 13, 1925 – August 3, 1966), born Leonard Alfred Schneider, was an American stand-up comedian, writer, social critic and satirist of the 1950s and 1960s. His 1964 conviction in an obscenity trial led to the first posthumous pardon in New York history. In part due to his freewheeling, jazz-like style, Lenny Bruce has always had fans in the music community. * Bruce is one of the celebrities immortalized on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. * The musical “Rent” includes the song “La Vie Boheme,” with the lyric “Ginsberg, Dylan, Cunningham, and Cage. Lenny Bruce! Langston Hughes!” * The clip of a news broadcast featured in “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night” by Simon & Garfunkel carries the ostensible newscast audio of Lenny Bruce’s death. In another track on the album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, “A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert MacNamara’d Into Submission)”, Paul Simon sings, “… and I learned the truth from Lenny Bruce, that all my wealth won’t buy me health.” * Bob Dylan’s 1981 song “Lenny Bruce” describes a brief taxi ride shared by the two legends. In the last line of the song, Dylan recalls: “Lenny Bruce was bad, he was the brother that you never had.” * Sections of the famous …
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